Red Star
Page 34
This suspicion of bourgeois specialists would come out strongly after the Russian Revolution. Perhaps it was expressed most graphically by Alexandra Kollontai, a leader of the Workers’ Opposition, who asserted that the technical specialists were “remnants of the past, by their entire nature closely, unalterably bound to the bourgeois system that we aim to destroy.”5
Bogdanov was committed both to revolution and to science, and he struggled to find a way to have the first without throwing out the second. In Engineer Menni the proletarian engineer Netti explained, “Thus far science is the weapon of our enemies. We will triumph when we have made it our weapon. . . . The proletariat must master it by changing it.” The new science transformed by the workers would be “Universal Organizational Science,” in other words Bogdanov’s favorite intellectual creation, tectology.
Bogdanov’s novels tell us much about Russia at the time of their composition, the last decade of tsarism, but they also may tell us something about the strange story of Bogdanov’s death. In a 1928 obituary entitled “The Tragedy of a Great Mind,” his old friend and fellow revolutionary R N. Lepeshinsky wrote that Leonid in the Utopian novels was the “alter ego,” even the “twin,” of Bogdanov himself, and that the clue to Bogdanov’s life and death could be found in his literary creations. Lepeshinsky also remarked that the “walls of the institute” where Bogdanov spent his last days may have been “the witness of a secret Bogdanov drama,” the last chapter of a life that united reality and literature.6
Bogdanov in the years of Soviet power stood aside from politics and immersed himself in scientific and literary activities. One of his major concerns was blood transfusion, a technique that became popular in World War I. To Bogdanov, blood transfusion acquired almost metaphysical overtones: it was a way to rejuvenate the exhausted human organism, and it was a symbol of the future of medicine in which the replacement of parts of the body would become routine. He created an institute for blood transfusion, and devoted himself to a series of experiments aimed at improving the technique.7
While Bogdanov, after the Russian Revolution, turned more and more toward science, he did not give up his literary aspirations. Indeed, he was planning a third book in the series of Utopian novels that began with Red Star. A few years after the Revolution he wrote a poem, included in this volume, giving the outlines of the third book. The third novel would be, in a sense, the mirror image of Red Star; instead of revolving around an Earthling’s attempt to adjust to life on Mars, it would concern the difficulties encountered by a Martian who tries to live on Earth.
In the poem, a Martian space ship crashes on Earth while attempting to land, and only one Martian survives. With his means of transportation destroyed, the Martian has no alternative but to adjust to terrestrial life. Yet he finds life on Earth to be so cruel and predatory that it is, for him, the same as hell. His faith that eventually the inhabitants of Earth will find the path to humane socialism such as that which exists on his native Mars is not enough to sustain him. Just as Leonid had fallen into melancholy as he tried to comprehend life on Mars, so the shipwrecked Martian plunges into despair on Earth. The chasm separating incompatible modes of cognition that so preoccupied Bogdanov as a philosopher once again emerges in his literary work.
It seems likely that, metaphorically speaking, Bogdanov considered himself to be a shipwrecked Martian looking upon the crudities of Earthly life. He believed that his philosophical systems of empiriomonism and tectology gave him the sort of understanding that the members of an advanced socialist society like his fictional Mars possessed. In an intellectual sense, Bogdanov believed that he had already lived on Mars, but reality condemned him bodily to live on Earth before socialism was successfully created there. Early Soviet Russia was to him not socialism but that life “that wretchedly gropes on in vain / Toward happiness, seeking to be free.”
In the late twenties, as Stalin gradually tightened his control over the Soviet Union, it became more and more difficult for a sensitive intellectual like Bogdanov to retain his faith that Russian socialism would ever find its way. He must have been haunted by the words he had put in the mouth of Sterni years earlier; Sterni had maintained that even if socialism begins to develop on Earth it will be “perverted deeply” and turn toward militarism because of its unfortunate environment.
Bogdanov must have felt like his hero Leonid in Red Star after he returned to Earth; Leonid found life there almost unbearable. He commented, “The new life is inaccessible to me, while I do not want the old one, to which I no longer belong either intellectually or emotionally.” Leonid decided to join the revolutionary struggle, and Dr. Werner wrote that “by exposing himself to the dangers there he is evidently indirectly trying to commit suicide.”
In real life in early 1928 some of the events described in the Utopian novels seemed to be coming true in Stalinist Russia, but in a way that shocked Bogdanov. The secret police announced that it had discovered a counterrevolutionary conspiracy among the engineers of the coal mines in the Ukraine. Fifty-three engineers and technicians were to be brought to court under accusations punishable by death. Bogdanov must have seen in the looming Shakhty trial the grotesque perversion of the ideas in his novels.
On April 7, 1928, the day after a special plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party had been called by Stalin to consider the Shakhty conspiracy, Bogdanov conducted an experiment on himself that, as a physician, he well understood was likely to be fatal. He exchanged his own blood with that of a young student who was suffering from both malaria and tuberculosis. He continued making detailed observations on his own condition until the last minutes of his life. His colleagues were amazed by the nonchalance with which he approached death, loyal to the attitude of the Martian physician attending the “room for the dying” who remarked that death “was only death, and no more.” (The student with whom Bogdanov exchanged blood, a man named Koldomasov, lives on in the Soviet Union to the present day.)8
Thus, Bogdanov’s death bears a striking resemblance to that of Engineer Menni in Bogdanov’s novel, who dreamed about the meaning of death just before his act of suicide. Menni’s hope was that “the greatness of death will fuse with the greatest act of creation, the moment which will conclude our life only to pass its soul on to our brothers, whoever they may be!”
NOTES
1. No definitive intellectual biography of Bogdanov exists, and there is not even a complete bibliography of his voluminous works. Major works on him are listed here in the selected bibliography: see especially Grille 1966 and Jensen 1978; see also Jensen 1982, Haupt 1974, Vucinich 1976, Baliestrem 1969, Shcheglov 1937, and Utechin 1962. For an article emphasizing Bogdanov’s importance in the history of science, see Graham 1977. Bogdanov wrote a short autobiography in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar, XLI (1926).
2. Susiluoto 1982, Iakhot 1982, and Setrov 1967. I am grateful to Zenovia Sochor for drawing the Iakhot reference to my attention.
3. Not only did he weep, but, upon hearing of the destruction of St. Basil’s and the Uspensky Cathedral, he resigned from the Bolshevik government. When he learned that the reports were false, he withdrew his resignation. See Fitzpatrick 1970, pp. 13–14.
4. Boris Souvarine wrote that the novel had a great influence on Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin. One cannot help but wonder if Stalin derived part of his suspicions of engineers as “bourgeois wreckers” from the novel. See Souvarine 1939, p. 504.
5. Kollontai 1968, p. 6.
6. Lepeshinsky 1928, p. 265.
7. Bogdanov 1927.
8. Interview with Bogdanov’s son, A. A. Malinovsky, Moscow, 20 January 1983.
Selected Bibliography
Bogdanov and Related Matters
Bailes, Kendall. 1977. “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism,” Soviet Studies 29/3 (July 1977).
Balie strem, Karl. 1969. “Lenin and Bogdanov,” Studies in Soviet Thought 9 (December 1969).
Bogdanov, A. A. (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovsky).
1904–07. Empiriomonizm, 3 vols. Moscow and St. Petersburg.
——. 1908. Krasnaya zvezda. St. Petersburg.
——. 1913. Inzhener Menni Moscow.
——. 1913–1929. Vseobshchaya organizatsionnaya nauka (Tektologiya), Parts 1–3. Moscow and St. Petersburg.
——. 1926. “Avtobiografiya,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, XLI, 29–34. 1926.
——. 1927. God raboty Instituta perelivaniya krovi (1926–1927,). Moscow.
Britikov, A. F. 1970. Russkii Sovetskii nauchno-fantasticheskii roman. Leningrad.
Brooks, Jeffrey. 1978. “Readers and Reading at the End of Tsarist Russia,” in William M. Todd, ed., Literature and Society in Imperial Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fetzer, Leland, ed. and tr. 1982. Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction: An Anthology (Seven Utopias and a Dream). Ann Arbor, ML: Ardis Publishers.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1970. The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Graham, Loren R. 1977. “Alexander Bogdanov,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Supplementary Volume. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Gregg, Percy. 1880. Across the Zodiac. 2 vols. London.
Grille, Dietrich. 1966. Lenins Rivale: Bogdanov und seine Philosophie. Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik.
Haupt, Georges. 1974. “Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (Malinovsky),” pp. 289–292 in G. Haupt and Jean-Jacques Marie, Makers of the Russian Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Iakhot, Iegoshua. 1982. “Gibel’ tektologii Bogdanova—predshestvennitsy kibernetiki i sistemnoi teorii,” in SSSR: Vnutrennye protivorechiya (No. 3, 1982), 227–273.
Ingold, Felix Philipp. 1978. Literatur und Aviatik: europäische Flugdichtung 1909–27. Basel.
Jensen, Kenneth. 1978. Beyond Marx and Mach: Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Philosophy of Living Experience. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
——. 1982. “Red Star: Bogdanov Builds a Utopia,” Studies in Soviet Thought 23/1 (January 1982), 1–34.
Joravsky, David. 1961. Soviet Marxism and Natural Science (1917–1932). London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul. Khazanova, V. E. 1980. Sovetskaya arkhitektura pervoi pyatiletki: problemy goroda budushchego. Moscow.
Kline, George. 1969. “Nietzschean Marxism in Russia,” pp. 166–183 in F. J. Adelmann, ed., Demythologizing Marxism. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Kollontai, Alexandra. 1969. “The Roots of the Workers’ Opposition,” Solidarity Pamphlet London.
Lasswitz, Kurd. 1971. Two Planets. H. Rudnik, tr. Car bon dale: Southern Illinois University Press. Translation of Auf zwei Planeten.
Lepeshinsky, E 1928. “Tragediya krupnogo uma,” Ogonëk 17 (22 April 1928), 265. Lowell, Percival. 1906. Mars and its Canals. London.
McGuire, Patrick. 1977. Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction. Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University.
Omelchenko, A. P. 1908. Svobodnaya lyubov i semya. St. Petersburg.
Scherrer, Jutta. 1978. “Les écoles du Parti de Capri et de Bologna,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 3/19 (1978), 258–284.
Setrov, M. I. 1967. “Ob obshchikh elementakh tektologii A. Bogdanova, kibernetiki i teorii sistem,” Uchënye zapiski kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk vuzov goroda Leningrada (No. 8, 1967), 49–60.
Shcheglov, A. V. 1937. Borba lenina protiv bogdanovskoi revizii marksizma. Moscow.
Souvarine, Boris. 1939. Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism. New York: Longmans, Green and Company.
Susiluoto, Ilmari. 1982. The Origins and Development of Systems Thinking in the Soviet Union: Political and Philosophical Controversies from Bogdanov and Bukharin to Present-Day Reevaluations. Helsinki.
Suvin, Darko. 1971. “The Utopian Tradition in Russian Science Fiction,” Modern Language Review 66/1 (1971), 139–159.
——. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Utechin, S. V. 1962. “Philosophy and Society: Alexander Bogdanov,” pp. 117–125 in L. Labedz, ed., Revisionism. New York: Praeger.
Vechnoe solntse: russkaya sotsialnaya utopiya i nauchnaya fantastika (vtoraya polovina XIX veka-nachalo XX veka), pp. 248–379. Moscow. (Bogdanov, Krasnaya zvezda.)
Von Braun, Werner, and Frederick Ordway. 1969. History of Rocketry and Space Travel rev. ed. New York.
Vucinich, Alexander. 1976. Social Thought in Tsarist Russia: The Quest for a General Science of Society, 1861–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Williams, Robert C. 1980. “Collective Immortality: The Syndicalist Origins of Proletarian Culture, 1905–1910,” Shvic Review 3/39 (September 1980), 389–402.
Utopias and Works of Science Fiction in Russian 1895–1915 (in chronological order)
V. N. Chikolev. 1895. Ne byl, no i ne vydumka—elektricheskii raskaz (Fiction but not Fantasy—an Electric Tale). St. Petersburg.
K. E. Tsiolkovsky. 1896. Vne zemli: nauchno-fantasticheskaya povest (Beyond the Earth: A Science Fiction Story). Moscow, 1958.
A. I. Krasnitsky. 1900. Za pripodnyatoyu zavesoi: fantasticheskaya povest o delakh budushchago (XX vek). (Behind Upraised Curtains: A Fantastic Story about Things in the Future (the 20th Century)). St. Petersburg.
L. B. Afanasev. 1901. “Puteshestvie na Mars” (Journey to Mars). Niva 1 (January 1901), 275–330, and Niva 3 (March 1901), 483–534.
August Bebel. (1905). Budushchee obshchestvo (The Society of the Future). Translated from German (1905). Moscow. 1918.
Atlanticus (pseud, of Karl Ballod). 1906. Gosudarstvo budushchago (The Future State). Translated from German. Preface by Karl Kautsky. Moscow.
N. Fëdorov. 1906 Vecher ν 2217 godu (An Evening in the Year 2217). St. Petersburg.
I. Morskoi. 1907 Anarkhisty budushchago—(Moskva cherez 20 let: fantasticheskii roman) (Anarchists of the Future—Moscow in 20 Years: A Novel of Fantasy). Moscow.
Jack London. 1908. Zheleznaya pyata (The Iron Heel). Moscow, 1918.
V. Semënov. 1908. Tsaritsa mira: roman-fantaziya (Empress of the World: A Fantasy Novel). St. Petersburg.
N. A. Morozov. 1910. Na granitse nevedomago (On the Verge of the Unknown). Moscow.
V. Ya. Bryusov. 1910 Zemnaya os (Axis of the Equator). 2nd. ed. Stories, 1901–1907. Moscow.
A. Ossendovsky. 1915. Zhenshchiny, vostavshiya i pobezhdënnyya: fantasticheskaya povest (Women Insurgent and Repressed: A Fantastic Story). Moscow.
LOREN R. GRAHAM is Professor of the History of Science at MIT and author of many books on the history of Soviet science. His most recent book is Moscow Stories (Indiana University Press, 2006).
RICHARD STITES is Professor of History at Georgetown University. His most recent book is Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia.
CHARLES ROUGLE is Associate Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Albany. He is editor of Red Cavalry: A Critical Companion and translator of many works from Russian.